What’s the Story? Sorting fact from fiction in the Jeremy Corbyn media saga
Earlier this week, BBC2’s Newsnight ran a lead story on the ever burning question of mainstream media bias against Jeremy Corbyn. As if in repost, the next day we got ‘traingate’ which arrived like fresh meat into the lap of Fleet Street wolves. Behind the story was Richard Branson, a self-described ‘patriot’ residing in a Caribbean tax haven, who pointed the finger of hypocrisy at the Labour leader. His specific charge was that Corbyn and his team had deliberately shunned a number of available seats on board one of his trains in order to stage a ‘sit in’ protest for the cameras.
There was a double irony in that editors who splashed the headline about Corbyn’s alleged playing up for the cameras have spent much of the last two months complaining about his apparent lack of a PR or media strategy. This is perhaps one of the most insidious claims in the on-going debate over media coverage of Corbyn — that the bias is somehow self-inflicted because of his refusal to play by Fleet Street’s rules.
But leaving all that to one side, it’s worth considering the substance of the story itself. One of the benchmarks that editors often claim to use when assessing the news value of stories like this — an assessment which determines a) whether the story will be published and b) how prominently it will be featured — is the ‘wow’ metric. Was this a ‘red-handed’ moment? Does the evidence actually show that Corbyn was playing up to the cameras or worse, lying about the lack of seats?
On close inspection, you don’t need to be a trained or experienced journalist to recognise that on the basis of such questions, this was a non-story. The CCTV images apparently showing Corbyn and his team walking past empty seats prior to settling down on the floor for the cameras is a case in point. Anyone who has travelled on peak time commuter trains will know that empty seats are not the same as available seats. Are we to assume that other passengers standing or sitting on the floor were somehow blind to these seats? or perhaps in on the act? And as for the image showing Corbyn taking a seat after the cameras had packed up, this was a deeply cynical attempt to suggest that the Corbyn team knew all along that seats were available. The facts — not denied by Virgin Trains — are that train staff had upgraded a family to first class (after Corbyn himself had refused the offer) in order to free up seats for him, his partner and his team. Indeed, Corbyn’s aides at the time were at pains to stress how helpful the train staff had been in trying to accommodate both them and other passengers without a seat.
Any of this basic fact checking should have been enough for a discerning editor to see the wood from the trees: that this was yet another shameless attempt to delegitimise the Corbyn leadership campaign based on anything except his policies. Yet the story still qualified as a major headline from the Telegraph to the Huffington Post. In the latter at least, it was superseded by another headline framed around the Corbyn’s team attempt to set the record straight. But by then the dominant narrative had already been established. It’s a pattern we’ve seen repeated consistently since Corbyn was elected leader of the party by a landslide victory less than 12 months ago.
Of course, many rightly point out that none of this appears to have done much damage to Corbyn’s grassroots base. But his critics also rightly point to a different story told by national polls which suggest that beyond the grassroots, Corbyn carries little favour with the electorate at large. Indeed, editors have tended to justify their particular news judgements about Corbyn on the basis of his poll ratings. But this assumes that the polls influence the news agenda rather than the other way around. It is particularly telling in this respect that a brief rise in Corbyn’s approval ratings back in the early spring coincided with a relative calm between media storms triggered by front bench briefings against the Labour leader.
It’s hard to believe that those in the Labour Party fermenting these storms are not wise to the reality that they do little to harm Corbyn’s core support, but do potentially influence the wider electorate. And by extension, it’s hard to imagine there has not been a calculation within Labour’s centre-right camp that the only way to wrestle back control of the party is to ‘tank’ it.
But contrary to what many on Corbyn’s side assume, most professional journalists are not complicit — at least willingly and consciously — in an orchestrated smear campaign against Corbyn. Whilst it’s no secret that newspapers have pursued a relentless editorial line of attack, the problem of bias in the likes of the BBC or the Guardian is more complex and deep-rooted. It is perhaps best captured by the response of Ceri Thomas — former editor of Panorama — to a complaint made internally by a BBC employee about the programme’s treatment of Corbyn. Specifically, he invoked a well-used phrase in professional journalism circles when justifying particular editorial judgements on the basis of what the ‘story’ was.
The implication is that professional journalists — by virtue of their training, experience or innate talent — have a sixth sense as to what issues matter to their audiences or the public at large, and how they should be covered; a raw ability to spot the ‘X factor’ of newsworthy material and convert it into an attention grabbing and attention keeping narrative.
But rarely do journalists reflect on whether or to what degree this sensitivity is vulnerable to pressures of institutional or cultural conformity. Seemingly oblivious to the legacy of Hillsborough, Bloody Sunday, and the 2008 Financial Crisis, the editorial director of The Sunday Times suggested on Newsnight that the mere fact that Fleet Street has treated Corbyn with contempt en masse is prima facie evidence of his leadership failures: “Jeremy Corbyn is not up to it, therefore he gets bad press”. It was a telling reminder that there are some within mainstream journalism who still believe that newspapers are immune to collective blind spots; an idea that seems as quaint as the suggestion that politicians never lie.
And so the story of the post-Brexit Labour leadership crisis — for the great swathe of mainstream media — was exclusively about shadow cabinet resignations, the motion of no confidence, and relentless calls from Parliamentary figures for Corbyn to resign. But beyond the Westminster Lobby was another story, one about a leader elected with an overwhelming mandate, who had inspired hundreds of thousands of people to engage or re-engage with politics, who had been under siege from the moment he took office and was the victim of a merciless and seemingly long-orchestrated coup.
To truly understand the phenomenon of media bias we need to recognise that neither story was ‘true’ or intrinsically more newsworthy than the other but that both were legitimate, each advanced by opposing sides in the leadership debate. The question then becomes, why was one story so overwhelmingly dominant in the coverage compared to the other? Why is Corbyn’s failure to recognise a pair of entertainment celebrities a lead headline whilst a suggestion by his challenger, Owen Smith, that Britain should negotiate with ISIS is billed as other news (and would the same imbalance have applied if it were the other way round)? These are questions beyond politics. They go to the heart of what the fourth estate is and should be in any vaguely functioning democracy. And they are questions that mainstream news organisations must now confront if they are to stem the growing tide of scepticism and mistrust in professional journalism.
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